This collection includes 150 letters Emily Carr wrote to her friends Nan Cheney and Humphrey Toms, and 100 other letters relating mainly to Emily Carr. The letters date from 1930 to 1945, the most prolific period in Carr’s career as both painter and writer. In them she writes in colourful detail about her everyday activities, and discusses her painting – “the biggest thing in my life.” There are outbursts of exasperation and anger as well as many indications of her caring, her warmth, her wisdom and her wit, and of her impatience with critics and poseurs, and they give insights into her various relationships with, among others, Lawren Harris, Ira Dilworth, Jack Shadbolt, Garnett Sedgewick, Dorothy Livesay, A.Y. Jackson, and Arthur Lismer.

Doreen Walker's profile page

Doreen Walker  is a senior instructor emerita of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia.

The collection is an important one; it gives us a taste of earthy, domestic Emily Carr, a sense of her everyday speech and her wonderful bad attitude to grammar and spelling which Walker had the good sense to leave.

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